Knots
A flickering candle tossed shadows across the back of your van. The drum of steady rain played over our heads as we laid together in your bed. Soft songs filled the air, and menstrual blood sat in the sink.
I drank apple juice for the first time in years as we stood at an angle. The street slanted to collect rain along the curbs.
Off-balance together.
We weren't in a movie scene, but you told me I spoke like a character from one. Or that I belonged in fiction because people like me don't exist in reality.
Your stomach started to cramp from an onrushing UTI. Your distaste of water and close relationship with antibiotics made this a regular occurrence.
You spoke of adventure as a cure for the darkness inside you. That somehow you could part from it as you left this continent for another.
Except you live as a rope—woven together with strands of sorrow that you refuse to let go. Worried you'll lose the identity you've so carefully created—even as it brings you pain.
You told me that real art requires suffering. As if that justified the self-inflicted torture you endure as you let your past loom over you.
I wonder who you would be without that Spector hanging over your shoulder.
We laid naked together—testing the limits of imagination as we both spoke of the future. I think we might each live as rope, but you can't tie a knot together with someone if your strands are on the verge of breaking.
We held each other— until your daily attack on memories of loves come and gone, as though you might destroy and replace them with ones of you. That somehow there's only a finite amount of love in the world, and if I had ever cared for anyone before you, they were a threat.
It was as if I should have only existed in the moments I experienced together with you. That I couldn't even speak of the last twenty-five years of life for fear of your anger towards anyone you had to share me with. You were jealous of the ghosts of people that no longer exist. Who I was with them, just as they were with me, are long gone.
I told you that I was here in the moment with you—but you selfishly wanted the whole story and not this chapter onwards.
I wanted to live in that candlelit moment. With heavy rain, ethereal guitar, and warm skin pressed against me. I wanted to dream of distant adventures and fill with hope instead of fear.
But shadows lived in between us. The flickers of past loves and harsh words peeking through. The silence settled, heavy weight upon our affection—showing the strain between creative liberation and production of fear.
That cramped bed saw bent toes and a crooked heart. It bothers me that you didn't think to lay in the other direction, where forgiveness was.